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• The Locus of Causality for Exercise Scale (LCES)
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• The Self-Determination Theory Website

The Behavioural Regulation In Exercise Questionnaire (BREQ)

The Behavioural Regulation In Exercise Questionnaire (BREQ) and its subsequent modifications have become the most widely used measures of the continuum of behavioural regulation in exercise psychology research. The original BREQ (Mullan, Markland & Ingledew, 1997) was developed to measure external, introjected, identified and intrinsic forms of regulation of exercise behaviour based on Deci & Ryan's (1985, 1991) continuum conception of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, described by organismic integration theory (click on the Theory link on the left for details).

The initial BREQ item pool also included items designed to tap amotivation but these were dropped during preliminary analyses because, due to the nature of the development sample, the items exhibited very high levels of skewness. Nevertheless, we recognised that with more general samples amotivation might well be an issue worth exploring. For this reason we (Markland & Tobin, 2004) reinstated the amotivation items in a second version of the instrument, called the BREQ-2. This version is available to download from this site.

In common with some other measures of the behavioural regulation continuum in different contexts, the BREQ-2 does not include an integrated regulation subscale. This is because in the initial stages of the development of the instrument we found that it was not possible to distinguish empirically between integration and identified regulation on the one hand and intrinsic regulation on the other hand. However, Wilson, Rodgers, Loitz, and Scime (2006: see BREQ-2 references) added an integration subscale to the instrument which works well.We have incorporated this subscale into the instrument to produce the BREQ-3, which is also available to download. The BREQ-3 also includes a new additional introjection item. If you use the BREQ-3, please cite both Markland and Tobin (2004) and Wilson et al. (2006) in any subsequent papers or reports.

We are currently working on a complete revision of the BREQ to incorporate recent advances in SDT. This version will become available in due course.